Assuming an average student enrollment of 50 per year, we arrive at a figure of – totally 2.25 lakh children
Of these, 25% are to be enrolled under RTE, i.e., 56,250 children by our assumption

Thus, the GO for RTE only affects the fates of 56,250 children out of 27 lakh children, i.e., 2% of enrollments in the academic year 2013-2014!

Now, let us look at another facet – the disadvantaged group is a somewhat wide net, which includes SC, ST, BC, MBC, Orphans, HIV/Transgender,BPL families, differently abled and children of conservancy workers

(Aside – I think the word used in the GO ‘scavenger’ is particularly offensive and derogatory, when applied to a human being.)

Now, of these numbers, I believe a good percentage would be children from economic backgrounds that would enter these schools anyway.
To explain, children from SC/ST/BC/MBC households that have the spending power to put their children in the same schools, will now be a offered a waiver on fee. We cannot expect a significant result in end-outcomes for them, in term of academic achievement.
So, I believe, the real impact, i.e., getting children into a school where they would not have been able to enrol but for the RTE act at a lower number, probably 1% of this coming years primary enrolments.

Major loopholes

Entry Age

The first and most glaring loophole is the definition of entry at Age 6. Now, anybody who has a child that goes to school knows that children very often start schooling as early as 3.

So, by the time the enrolment under RTE act kicks in, at age 6, children admitted under this Act could face a significant disadvantage in terms of being able to catch up with the children who have already been in the system form the age of 3/4.

Fee Re-imbursement

There is the question of reimbursement of fee revenue foregone by the schools by admitting students under RTE. It is not clear whether 100% of fees foregone, as per Govindarajan committee, will be refunded.

If not, the loss will have to be picked up by someone – either illegaly, by under-the-table payments or by starting a new ‘management’ quota.

The management quota would involve giving seats at higher fees so that a certain portion of the foregone fee can be compensated.

Drop-outs/Transfers

The policy for drop-outs/transfers is not clear.

Let us take the case of a child transferring from school A to school B
Once a child transfers from one school to the other, would his/her status as a entrant under RTE continue? So, what happens to the existing 25% already admitted under RTE in school B? Does the school have to keep adding more and more RTE students, above and beyond quota?
What about the seat now vacant in school A? Does it have to be filled only by a child from within RTE quota alone?

Footnotes:

Note that I am not going into the other, more commonly discussed areas – exclusion of minority schools, exclusion of schooling for differently abled children

New RTE regulations for schools, which could imply quite a good number of schools actually shutting down. I am not going to discuss that, as it has been very well analyzed elsewhere